Web Scraping is a type of Web Crawling, and is the process of using software to browse the content of sites of interest and subsequently extract data from visited pages. The intention of scarping is to extract the site essence usually for business needs. For example, an online site can scrape its competitors in order to extract the prices they offer.
There are two impacts for scraping: the first and obvious one is the business impact. It discloses sensitive information from the site which was not meant to be disclosed in such a manner, the second is bandwidth – the scrapers activity can consume even 50% of the site bandwidth forcing the site to pay and increase its bandwidth.